We booked to do a 1 day course at the Chang Siam Elephant Training Mahout School based on a recommendation from one of our friends so we didn’t have too many hang ups about which one we were going to pick. You’ll soon find that in Chiang Mai there is a lot of choice for this type of excursion. We booked through Panda Tours based at 179 Thapae Rd but the school do have an office in Chiang Mai where  you can also book this trip. There were 6 of us on the trip with one tour leader and the elephant trainers who live at the farm who are either part of the family who own the elephants or hired to train them. This isn’t a case of training an elephant to perform tricks, it’s about communicating with them for the purpose of elephant and human being to be able to live and work alongside each other. There are no wild elephants left in the north of Thailand as they were all captured many years ago by native Thai’s who used the elephants for log moving and transportation. We have found out that one elephant costs 1,000,000 Thai Baht which is around £200,000 so they are worth a hell of a lot of money to their owners.

The elephants at this farm range in age between 1-40 years old with a mixture of 9 male and female elephants. We had heard some horror stories about the way elephants are treated in Thailand by their owners and many of these camps offer elephant riding, shows, performances and the like. What we wanted to do was to spend the day with the elephants, learning how to communicate with them through traditional Thai Mahout training, feed them, learn about the way they live in the north and then go on a bare back ride to the water hole where we could wash and bathe them. So this is what we did, whilst we were there we did see fellow tourists riding the elephants on wooden seats, which we’ve heard isn’t very good for the long term quality of life for the elephant, so we were a little disspointed to see this. However everything else lived up to our expectations and from the start we had a really good laugh too.

We learned about the history of these elephants, where they had come from and why the owners had come to have them in their family. We also learned that in order for the elephants and the locals to live peacefully the elephants needed to be kept in farms and in contained areas as otherwise they eat everything they come across which over the years has led to crops being destroyed and elephant poachers getting what they want.

We learned the commands of going forwards, backwards, left, right and the all important stop which in western voice is completely different from the way the Thai’s pronounce it so we think the elephants went along with their trainers commands over ours! We fed them a good amount of bananas as they need to eat around 300 or so pounds of food per day. We went on an hour walk with the elephants and Dave and I shared ours swapping part way through to direct the elephant through the forest. We had some encounters with bushes, dung and steep inclines but it was really good fun along the way. We finished the trek at the water pool where the elephants got straight in and we washed and bathed them aswell as carrying on with a water fight that the trainers started. This was probably the most rewarding part of the day and we got to try out our new underwater Sony DSC-TX5 camera which we hope is going to provide us with another creative element to our blogs in the future.

We paid 1800 Baht each for the day and this included lunch and transport which took about an hour from Chiang Mai heading north. This was the price for sharing an elephant and it cost 2500 Baht to have one to yourself for the day. We were happy to share though. It was a pretty satisfying day, and if you do have any hang ups about going to one of the elephant camps from Chiang Mai it’s worth looking into what they do on their one day itinerary. There are some companies who only have elephants that have been rescued from poachers or farms where they have been mistreated and The Elephant Nature Park is one of these with good reviews.

(Sony DSC-TX5 waterproof camera, processed in Lightroom 3)

Oh oh beautiful Pai! How we loved our days camping in our wonderful boutique style tent with views across the valleys…not to make people jealous but we really were spoilt and all for as little as 250 baht a night! We loved spending time in our tent, reading, watching the sunrise, and having the luxury of a duvet! It was very hot during the daytime when we were here sometimes reaching 38 degrees, but in the night we were nicely cooled by the 16 degree air. This felt quite cold actually, long gone are the cold nights in China.

There isn’t that much to do in Pai to be honest, but it is a very beautiful town with lots of yoga class offerings, cooking classes, walks, bike rides and so on. In the night-time the streets turn into a walking night market with local crafts and clothes many of which are made by the neighboring tribal villages. We picked up a few nicely branded Pai items which are hard to avoid, but they do tend to stand out over most tourist branded things. There are opportunities to hike and explore on kayaking tours in the wet season but we opted for some low-key adventuring in the form of hiring a motorbike for the day and exploring most of Pai’s famous sights. It is a very twee place and extremely popular with Thai holiday makers due some old films that were made there in the 90′s.

There is a pool around 1km outside of Pai in the direction of the Canyon at a place called Fluid, it’s a good sized swimming pool and they have plenty of space for sunbathing too. The food there is okay but overpriced for what you get, however it’s probably the best place in town to cool down from the heat especially when the river is at a low level.

Helen found a nice yoga class to attend which cost 200 baht for a 2 hour session, if she hadn’t had been struck by her 3rd tummy bug in 5 weeks then she would have been able to attend a few more classes!! It’s also a great way to meet people as many will do 3 classes in a row before moving on. Aside from the stomach upsets though we had a fantastic time here and would consider returning. We don’t think we’d be able to get as good a deal on accommodation in the future especially for our little set up as we knew they were a new resort.

So 5 days later and we were ready to head back to Chiang Mai. We can quite see why people end up hanging around Pai for longer than anticipated. There are great restaurants offering a variety of good Thai, western and other foods, there are places to go and drink chai, a good choice of bars, shops to poke around in,  and a nice river that flows through beautiful scenery. If you’re a little prone to travel sickness then the 764 turnings in the road to get there may cause a slight problem but getting a mini-van would help with this. We got a minivan there for 180 baht and the return journey to Chiang Mai was only 150. You can get a local bus for around 72 baht if you don’t mind being crammed into the rooftop and the journey takes around 3-4 hours.

When we got back into Chiang Mai we sorted out a few arrangements for the next few days; one was to book an elephant mahout day, another to do a one day massage course and the last to sort out our travel arrangements to Bangkok.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

We got an early bus to Koh Kong, although as per usual it took over an hour to leave the city and then we were still stopping along the way to pick up other passengers, many of whom didn’t have seats so were sat on plastic chairs in the aisles. After around 5 hours or so we landed in Koh Kong at a bus stop a little way out of the main streets, tuk-tuk drivers once again were hassling us to take pick up into town, but we knew from the scale of the map that it wouldn’t be too far to walk. We met Ali and Carl who’d been traveling mainly in India on the bus and we all decided to walk in together. We landed at The Dugout Hotel, which is quite easy to find on the main street leading towards the market. The manager is Australian and pretty helpful when it comes to advice in the area, we opted for a room that was more than we were hoping to pay but thought we’d just stay there the one night. They have a small pool there too so we were keen to go in for a dip to cool down from the afternoon heat.

Later on we met up with Ali and went to have a chat with a local eco-tour operator ran by a friendly chap called Mr T, his office is located at Dugout, and they are owned by the same guy who runs the Oasis Bungalow resort a little way out of town. We found out about tours on offer and what was possible for us to do and see on Koh Kong Island, after going back and forth and realising we couldn’t stay on the Island, Mr T made a few calls and pretty much made up a tour for us on the spot. We could take a 2 day boat trip to Koh Kong Island, visit the beautiful beaches, have barbecues on the beach, all of our food and stay at a fishing village called Alatan that is connected to the island via stilts and wooden bridges. For the 4 of us to go it would cost $55 each! This was a good price considering the tours we had paid for in Vietnam. So we agreed and decided to leave the following day. If you do go to the tourist office at The Dugout please note that this isn’t a tour they do on a regular basis so don’t expect it to be advertised. They offer other types of tours including jungle treks and mountain biking in the area, Koh Kong itself doesn’t have much going on, it’s a small town which can be used as a handy base to go off and explore.

We were picked up at 8am and taken to the harbour where we had a boat, driver and guide waiting with us along with a fridge full of food. It was a long boat that they had decked out for our comfort, Mr T came along to make sure everything was ready and set up for us and off we went. The first part of the boat trip took around 2 hours and on the way we even bought our fish from a local fisher-mans boat! We took a brief stop at beach number 1, we all jumped off the boat and went for a swim in the crystal clear waters. The beach was beautiful with no-one else around so we were excited about going to the further afield beaches.

After around half an hour we carried on towards beach number 3, here we stopped and the driver threw in the anchor. We had until around 4pm here, and so we swam, sunbathed, ate a fantastic fish barbecue meal, swam some more, the guide built us a shelter from the sun, Carl tried to catch a crab and so on. All in all it was absolutely gorgeous, we had the whole place to ourselves, the sea was beautiful and clear and it was so serene. At last we had found a paradise. We had heard that not many people come to Koh Kong Island other than on day trips because the military operate the Island so it’s not the safest place to stay, also the trips only go when there are more than 4 people so this meant we didn’t see any other tourists, only fishing boats.

After a lazy afternoon on the beach we got back into our boat and made the hour journey to Alatan fishing village. We weren’t expecting what awaited us at all. The village is build up of around 50 or so houses all built on stilts going away from the Island for around 1km. As we arrived many local children were waiting for us, all shouting hello and smiling and laughing nervously in anticipation of our arrival. We instantly felt very humble and privileged to be there and were taken into the house which would be our base for our stay. As soon as we got inside the children were posing for photographs, asked Dave to do some English spelling and took us up onto the Island where their school is based. We were quite overwhelmed by the whole experience, they were so happy for us to be sharing their home with them, showing us around their school and attempting to speak English with us. The photography opportunities here were fantastic.

After an hour or so of playing with the children we sat down for dinner and enjoyed more fish, rice, salad and fruit. We had previously seen two full size snooker tables in one of the houses a little further away from where we were and asked if we could play some snooker/pool. We have no idea how easy or hard it was for them to get those things in there, we were amazed that they had them and they clearly kept them in mint condition. It was also amazing to see how each family have some way of making money; either by fishing, selling groceries, a little cafe at one end and then the snooker hall!

So we played for an hour until going to bed at around 10pm, we had an audience watching us the entire time and Helen didn’t play well at all. We kind of just wanted to be unseen at this moment in time wishing for a game of pool on a snooker table to end!! Unfortunately for us Ali and Carl beat us 2-0, but Helen always makes a point that pub sports…just ain’t her thing! ha ha!

So to our bedroom which our hosts had vacated for us for that night, 4 of us all lined up on a thin mattress, with water underneath and noises from loud televisions, babies’ crying and the like meant we were on for a restless night. Still the experience of being there far outweighed any of this and we were very happy to have stayed in Alatan that night.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)

Ho Ho Ho…Merry Christmas to you all!

Thanks for following our journey and supporting the notworkrelated adventure! We really appreciate your comments and look forward to more in 2011!

We hope you enjoy some fabulous New Years celebrations and we’ll see you sometime next year!

All the best from Hong Kong!

David & Helen xx

So I finally left my home of 4 years this week & moved in with my parents who live closer to Liverpool. This has been one of the major hurdles for me in the build up to our trip. Not just in the sense that I have managed to accumulate a lot of things during my time on the lovely Burns Street and getting it out of there in time before new tenants were to move in! But the fact that I’ve really loved living there, it’s been my own place to do what the hell I want, when I want & I’ve loved it! So having to let go of it (a material thing) has been really difficult for me, but I feel that the excitement & planning involved with notworkrelated has kept me well distracted & it was only this week that got to me.

This move means we are getting closer to our leaving date…I have so much sorting out to do & we still have travel plans to finalise, but I guess this is part of the parcel of going away for a year…at least that’s what my parents keep telling me. I will enjoy my time here with them though & make the most of seeing my family whilst we’re still here. Over the next few weeks I’ll be seeing close friends, catching up with my brother, his girlfriend & their beautiful daughter Sukie, as well as buying our last minute items for the trip, so no doubt we will have a few more updates before we go.

So fairwell to my happy home that has given me a real sense of security over the last few years, I will miss my home and friends in Leicester, but now it’s time for someone else to enjoy living there.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0, processed in Photoshop)